Radio-TV mirror (July-Dec 1954)

a very omantic fellow (Continued) diplomat in love with Stella's daughter Laurel. The other is The Romance Of Helen Trent, in which he plays another romantic young man, of Spanish origin, in love with Cynthia. "See what I mean?" he asks, "Take a look at these scripts. In them, I'm really a very romantic fellow. In others, too. I sometimes appear in the television drama, Three Steps To Heaven, in the role of a sentimental and ardent artist. I am a swashbuckling and incurable romanticist in a series of TV films made recently in Rome and now ready for release here. I play intermittent roles on several other daytime serials — and all of them romantic. But, comes evening, I am just another fellow who likes to date a pretty girl. And is still a bachelor." One of these pretty girls is young actress Janet de Gore, a petite and piquante redhead with sparkling brown eyes and a shapely figure. She and Donald met some years ago, when she was fifteen and he was a few years older. "I thought of him then as a fascinating older man," she says of him now. "He thought of me as a kid." After a while they lost track of each other, until a day last winter when she saw him on the street and yoo-hooed to him to stop and tell an old friend what he had been doing all those months. It seemed to take quite a while — through dinners for two at little restaurants that have now become their favorites ... at movies and the theater, when they could take time out from their respective jobs . . . sometimes at parties . . . and, as spring came on, at sunny tables on the terrace at the Central Park Zoo, where you can dine to the music of a lion's roar or the splash of a playful seal. But both insist it isn't romance. Rather, that it's a case of two hard-working people who are attracted to each other by mutual interests. Those interests are primarily a love of acting — and everything connected with it — and an ambition to learn more and more about its techniques. They both have continued to take lessons in dancing, and in singing, and to work with little groups of professionals in actors' workshops. Both have a background of solid professional experience in theater, radio and television. Janet played the older sister in "The Member of the Wedding" during its Broadway run, toured with Shirley Booth in "The Time of the Cuckoo," has been seen in dozens of leading roles on the big TV dramatic shows ("I play nice girls on television"). She is heard in many radio dramas ("I'm usually cast as the gun moll or some other unpleasant kind of dame on radio, oddly enough") . Donald admits a bias toward career girls, probably because he sees them more often than any others. "I like a girl to be natural and not assume any poses," he says, "and this applies to actresses, as well." He teases Janet about her cooking: "She's much too brilliant an actress and much too decorative a girl to worry with pots and pans, so it's all right if she can't cook." "He used to cut out recipes and give them to me to try," she teases in return, "but now he gives them to other (.Continued on page 100) Donald Buka is Seiior Alicante in The Romance Of Helen Trent, CBS Radio, 12:30 P.M., for Whitehall Pharmacal Co., Boyle-Midway, and Prom Home Permanents. He is Stanley Warrick in Stella Dallas, NBC Radio, 4:15 P.M., for Phillips' Milk of Magnesia and Prom, and often acts in My True Story, ABC Radio, 10 A.M., for Bayer Aspirin. All EDT, M-F. Snapshots of a busy day and date: Donald waits as Janet primps . . . Janet watches doubtfully as he gets that famous crew 46 cut from Gus Purman of the Sherry-Netherland . . . then they drop by for a visit with artist Andre Duranceau at his studio. Performer*' holiday: Actress Janet de Gore poses for actor (and amateur photographer) Donald Buka. So whqt if Janet can't cook? They have a lot of interests in common, practice their voice lessons together . . . take a few moments' relaxation in nearby Central Park . . . then back to work, as Donald redecorates the terrace of his apartment. ■■